Archive for January 15th, 2009

Davide had no better stuff to do, so here I am (hating him), abiding to these rules:

Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.

Share seven facts about yourself in the post.

Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.

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7 Facts

I don't consider myself a bearded guy: I shave my face whenever I find 10 spare minutes to do it. That's once per month on average, therefore for most people I meet I am a bearded guy nonetheless.

I received a fifteen years long salesian catholic education (7 years with nuns, while I was 4-10, and 8 years with priests, 11-18). I suspect this had a big part both in the depth/breadth of my scriptural/doctrinal knowledge, and in my ultimate (consequential?) militant atheism. Which prompts an interesting paradoxical question: what should I better do to raise my soon to be released child as a free thinker?

My first computer was a Commodore 64... wait, you might know this one... OK, but you may not know that when I was 12 I wrote a trilogy of C64 school-themed video-games depicting my priest-teachers as flying horned devils. I sold them among my schoolmates with some good financial success (that was a so called "elite" school).

My first web page, established on Geocities back in the past century and entirely built with Amiga technologies, was the Marxism-Leninism-Prodism-Gargarism home page. I lost my credentials, and even if I did try several times to make Yahoo pull it down I'm afraid it will persist as an indelible stain on my past. It was somehow prophetic about the dissolution of any serious left-wing in Italy, though...

I met my wife, a teacher of Greek and Latin and a published author of school textbooks, when we both were 15, and we've been good friends albeit living in two different towns for more than ten years, meeting once every two years or so. Then I had to teach a short course in her town, staying there for a couple of weeks, and when I was about to leave I suddenly asked her to marry me. She just exploded in a loud laughter. But after less than of one month, she relocated to live with me. I punished her offensive initial reaction by making us "live as public sinners" for another ten years, until I decided it was time to perpetuate our genes :)

Both my thumbs can bend backwards by 90 degrees (much like in AndrÃ¨s Segovia's right hand).

In a conflict where the Western news media have been largely prevented from reporting from Gaza because of restrictions imposed by the Israeli military, Al Jazeera has had a distinct advantage. It was already there.

More importantly, the permissive CC-BY license means that the footage can be used by anyone including, rival broadcasters, documentary makers, and bloggers, so long as Al Jazeera is credited.

So, rather than labeling its unique original footage as "exclusive", the Arabian network is giving it away for anyone (competitors included) to watch, analyze, share and reuse, leveraging an open source (GPL) open media platform and hosting it on an open source (GPL) CMS.
What do you think?